Berberis' World

My September song is ‘Message In A Bottle’ by The Police.

I can remember where I was the moment I first heard it; in the back room of the house where I lived in Bristol, trying desperately to find an excuse to not revise for my O levels. I was sitting in the bay window which looked out over a courtyard of perhaps fifteen foot by twenty, now paved in cream and pink tiles – quite as awful as it sounds – where there was once a patch of worn turf. Certainly not enough on which to play football, or tennis, or any other sport interesting to a teenager. Tennis was mine. I couldn’t play that in such a confined space, either.

(Just a castaway, an island lost at sea-o…)

We’d moved to the house partly because we needed more space. Three adults and three children in a chalet bungalow was proving claustrophobic, and when one of those adults was keen to relocate in order to avoid village gossip, the excuse of needing more space was the one which was quoted to those who asked why we were leaving behind our 200′ garden with its two pears trees, two plum trees and an apple tree, its vegetable patch and its laburnum, and its seemingly endless privet hedges.

(Anuzzer lonely day, with no one here but me-o…)

Don’t get me wrong; we were in no way rich. We were lucky to have such a marvellous garden, although, as with much that you have and take for granted, you don’t miss it, really miss it with a part of you that never forgets and never quite forgives, until you look out of the bay window and see a cream and pink paved courtyard with no space for even a bonsai tree, let alone a full sized specimen. Small gardens breed pots. Usually plastic and garish, and in no way an adequate substitute for a double-dug bed stuffed with rhubarb. Small gardens have no time for compost heaps, the festering, rotting, multicoloured pile of potato peelings and carrot tops and pea shells and grass clippings  They do not accommodate swings and heavy iron rollers and miles and miles of washing line for the Widow Twankee amount of laundry done every Monday, as regular as clockwork.

(More loneliness than any man could bear…)

Courtyards require washing to be hung high, on display to all who care to look out of their back windows and purse their lips at yet another load of jeans and tee-shirts and sheets and pillowcases. Where other households dried their washing was a mystery. Perhaps they all took it up to the launderette. Courtyards are no place for bicycles and motorbikes and dustbins, there is no room for sheds and workbenches and other things that a large garden can hide in its lush foliage, or conceal behind tree trunks and bushes.

(Rescue me before I fall in to despair-o…)

At that time, Radio 1 ended transmission at 5.45 pm, following a fifteen minute news programme called ‘Newsbeat’. The DJ for the final show before this, in September 1979, was ‘Kid’ Jensen. I don’t remember his first name, but he was called ‘Kid’ because he was young. He came from Canada, and his was an exotic voice on what was still a RP-filled station. I’d heard the song before but not really taken much notice of it, not the way I do now with songs that catch my ear. Then, if it sounded good, the words didn’t really matter. Now, the words matter more than the tune and even the most perfectly structured melody in the universe will not redeem lyrics which speak of anger and violence and abuse.

(I’ll send an S.O.S to the world…)

I don’t really know what it was about this particular day, about this particular time it was played, but something in the lyrics, something in the tune, touched a nerve and I can see still the old sofa bed – dark green and rough-textured – that stood under the bay window, cushions which didn’t match it or each other arranged, diamond-like, along its back. It was the same sofa that had stood in the front room of our old house, against the wall opposite the window, the heavy, clunking, hard sofa which was used by my father whilst my mother took the bed in the back room.

(I hope that someone gets my message in a bottle…)

Anyone who really knows me will know me now. I’m not sure if I’m still on that island, lonely, sending out an S.O.S, my message in a bottle, hoping to be rescued before I fall into despair. I like to think that I’m not, that my message was received and understood. There are times, though, as the days grow shorter and the leaves begin to turn and the air carries with it the unmistakeable chill of autumn, that my September song comes to mind and I’m back in that room, looking out onto that courtyard and seeing, in my mind’s eye, 200′ of grass and green and fruit trees.

And I send out another S.O.S. Just in case no one was listening the first time.